Case Number 11724: Small Claims Court

Lost By Dead

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All Rise...

Sometimes Judge David Johnson just has no @#$%-ing clue what's going on in a movie.

The Charge

Disclaimer: I apologize to the filmmakers if I missed out on your edgy vision
but my head hurts

The Case

I'm not going to mince words: this film is trippy. And not in that
so-surreal-it's-kind-of-cool way, but more in the
irritating-hard-to-follow-borderline-pretentious-I-want-to-take-a-pistol-air-rivet-gun-to-my-skull
way.

Lost by Dead is a Japanese film, shot entirely in black and white. It
tells the story of a musician named Akira who is ravaged by guilt over the death
of his girlfriend, a fate he played a role in. On the periphery are Akira's
band-mates hoping to wean their front man off his despair in time for their Big
Gig, Akira's long-suffering-in-love lady friend who worries about her beloved's
mental health, some street punk with Lisa Simpson hair and a ruthless Yakuza
bastard. All these elements in Akira's life crash together during the final,
violent, wacko scene and you'll likely be left popping Ibuprofen.

Akira bounces from crisis to crisis in a psychological shambles over the
course of the 85-minute runtime, with each shady encounter growing more and more
violent. He finds himself enveloped in drugs and in his haze frequently gets
into bloodier and bloodier fracases. Eventually the people that care about him
get sucked into his path of self-destruction and, well, needless to say it's not
all puppy dogs and lollipops.

I get what director Masato Tsujioka (who also wrote, edited and produced)
was going for: a harrowing depiction of a man's downward spiral. And I'll give
him that much, it was harrowing. Akira gets royally @#$%-ed up, both from his
rampant drug abuse and the brutal fights he by far gets the worst of. So in that
respect, mission accomplished Mr. Tsujioka, you've successfully crafted a
picture of guilt-fueled self-immolation.

And as cheerful as that sounds, the brain-stabbingly sensory
overload-a-riffic presentation that Tsujioka injects in his story pretty much
derails the entire experience. The editing is frenetic and distracting, there
are some bizarre meta-narrative interludes (reminded me of a Greek chorus strung
out on PCP) strewn throughout and the screaming. Oh, the screaming. It seems
like everyone in this film bellows out the most obnoxious guttural sounds known
to humankind. I hate to betray my ignorance, but, sorry, I have no idea what all
the screaming means.

The true deal-breaker, however, is the godforsaken video quality. Slapped
with a non-anamorphic widescreen transfer, the film looks horrible. The black
and white picture is soft as it is, but when you add in the unacceptable level
of grain in most of the scenes, you're looking at a broken DVD. The grain
becomes so impressive that some scenes—most of which occur in the
dark—are nigh-opaque. I could suck down a confusing mélange of images
of and sounds and stylistic quirks, but the abysmal transfer is a
non-starter.

If you're still intrigued, here's the rest of the skinny: the 2.0 stereo
Japanese track is supplemented by English subtitles and the only extra of note
is a selection of interviews with the cast and crew.